Ecological research and conservation practice frequently raise difficult and varied ethical questions for scientific investigators and managers, including duties to public welfare, nonhuman individuals (i.e., animals and plants), populations, and ecosystems. The field of environmental ethics has contributed much to the understanding of general duties and values to nature, but it has not developed the resources to address the diverse and often unique practical concerns of ecological researchers and managers in the field, lab, and conservation facility. The emerging field of “ecological ethics” is a practical or scientific ethics that offers a superior approach to the ethical dilemmas of the ecologist and conservation manager. Even though ecological ethics necessarily draws from the principles and commitments of mainstream environmental ethics, it is normatively pluralistic, including as well the frameworks of animal, research, and professional ethics. It is also methodologically pragmatic, focused on the practical problems of researchers and managers and informed by these problems in turn. The ecological ethics model offers environmental scientists and practitioners a useful analytical tool for identifying, clarifying, and harmonizing values and positions in challenging ecological research and management situations. Just as bioethics provides a critical intellectual and problem-solving service to the biomedical community, ecological ethics can help inform and improve ethical decision making in the ecology and conservation communities.
The field of environmental ethics concerns human beings’ ethical relationship with the natural environment. While numerous philosophers have written on this topic throughout history, environmental ethics really only developed into a specific philosophical discipline in the 1970s. The reason for this emergence was no doubt due to the increasing awareness in the 1960s of the effects that technology, industry, economic expansion and population growth were having on the environment. The development of such awareness was aided by the publication at this time of two important books. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, first published in 1962, alerted readers to how the widespread use of chemical pesticides was posing a serious threat to public health and was also leading to the destruction of wildlife. Of similar significance was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which warned of the devastating effects on the planet’s resources of a spiraling human population. Of course, pollution and the depletion of natural resources have not been the only environmental concerns since that time: dwindling plant and animal biodiversity, the loss of wilderness, the degradation of ecosystems, and climate change are all part of a raft of ‘green’ issues that have implanted themselves into both public consciousness and public policy over subsequent years. The job of environmental ethics is to outline our moral obligations in the face of such concerns. In a nutshell, the two fundamental questions that environmental 1 ethics must address are: what duties do humans have with respect to the environment, and why? The latter question usually needs to be considered prior to the former; in order to tackle just what our obligations are, it is usually thought necessary to consider first why we have them. For example, do we have environmental obligations for the sake of human beings living in the world today, for humans living in the future, or for the sake of entities within the environment itself, irrespective of any human benefits? Different philosophers have given quite different answers to this fundamental question which, as we shall see, has led to the emergence of quite different environmental ethics.
The subject of Western environmental ethics has been widely written about and discussed but the same can not be said of ‘Japanese’ environmental ethics. This discipline has not been covered in any branch of Japanese philosophy nor has there been sufficient pressure exerted by ecologists on Japanese thinkers and writers to explain how the Japanese code addresses environmental concerns. Although some Japanese scholars have in the past articulated their ideas on working with the natural world, the field covering the spirit and core of Japanese environmental ethics remains largely unexplored. This paper examines and compares the discipline of Japanese environmental ethics, a ‘bottom up process’, with that of the Western model, a ‘top down process’. It defines, and presents a new insight into environmental ethics from the Japanese perspective where the concept of ‘living with nature’ is more sensitive towards the environment than is the Western one of ‘taming nature’.
Three decades ago, planned obsolescence was a widely discussed ethical issue in marketing classrooms. Planned obsolescence is topical again today because an increasing emphasis on continuous product development promotes shorter durables replacement and disposal cycles with troublesome environmental consequences. This paper offers explanations of why product obsolescence is practiced and why it works. It then examines the ethical responsibilities of product developers and corporate strategists and their differing responses to this problem. Pro-environment product design and marketing practices and innovative government policies may alleviate the problem over time. However, given the current lack of understanding about consumer replacement and disposal behavior, it is questionable as to whether these practices and policies will be sufficiently informed to be effective. Thus, marketing scholars have a significant opportunity to contribute to sustainable durables product development.
This paper explores some interconnections between the business and environmental ethics movements. The first section argues that business has obligations to protect the environment over and above what is required by environmental law and that it should cooperate and interact with government in establishing environmental regulation. Business must develop and demonstrate environmental moral leadership. The second section exposes the danger of using the rationale of “good ethics is good business” as a basis for such business moral leadership in both the business and environmental ethics movements. The third section cautions against the moral shallowness inherent in the position or in the promotional strategy of ecological homocentrism which claims that society, including business, ought to protect the environment solely because of harm done to human beings and human interests. This paper urges business and environmental ethicists to promote broader and deeper moral perspectives than ones based on mere self-interest or human interest. Otherwise both movements will come up ethically short.
This Second Edition of “A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth offers” clear, powerful, and often moving thoughts from Holmes Rolston III, one of the first and most respected philosophers to write on the environment and often called the “father of environmental ethics.” Rolston surveys the full spectrum of approaches in the field of environmental ethics and offers critical assessments of contemporary academic accounts. He draws on a lifetime of research and experience to suggest an outlook, and even hope, for the future. This forward-looking analysis, focused on the new millennium, will be a necessary complement to any balanced textbook or anthology in environmental ethics. The First Edition guaranteed “to put you in your place.” Beyond that, the Second Edition asks whether you want to live a “de-natured life on a de-natured planet.
Environmental Ethics is a systematic account of values carried by the natural world, coupled with an inquiry into duties toward animals, plants, species, and ecosystems. A comprehensive philosophy of nature is illustrated by and integrated with numerous actual examples of ethical decisions made in encounters with fauna and flora, endangered species, and threatened ecosystems. The ethics developed is informed throughout by ecological science and evolutionary biology, with attention to the logic of moving from what is in nature to what ought to be. The ethical theory is applied in detail to social, public, and business policy. Written in an engaging style, using diagrams and figures as well as numerous case studies, Environmental Ethics prods the reader into concrete application and invites reader participation in the ethical discussions. The ethics concludes by exploring the historical experiences of personal residence in a surrounding environment. Here is an adventure into what it means to live as responsible human beings in the community of life on Earth. In the series Ethics and Action, edited by Tom Regan.
This eighth volume in the SAGE Series on Green Society covers the moral relationship between humans and their natural environment, specifically targeting the contemporary green movement. Since the 1960s, green ethics and philosophies have helped give birth to the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, as well as contemporary environmentalism. With a primary focus on green environmental ethics, this reference work, available in both print and electronic formats, presents approximately 150 signed entries arranged A-to-Z, traversing a wide range of curricular disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, business, economics, religion, and political science. A rich blend of topics, from the Hannover Principle to green eco-feminism, responsible eco-tourism, corporate values and sustainability, and more, are explained by university professors and scholars, all contributing to an outstanding reference mainly for academic and public libraries.
Despite its importance in addressing the widespread global destruction of nature, contemporary environmental ethics often relies on two misguided claims. These are: 1. That ecology provides reliable scientific laws for remedying environmental destruction. 2. That environmental ethics should be biocentric, not anthropocentric, and therefore that nonhuman beings should be accorded equal consideration of their interests, just as humans are.
This paper analytically characterizes the four main environmental sustainability paradigms (i.e., WS, weak sustainability; AG, a-growth; DG, de-growth; and SS, strong sustainability) by introducing uncertainty about future preferences for consumption and future technologies. SS represents an ethical approach because of its maximum aversion to inter-generational inequality of resources, whereas DG depicts preference changes, AG depicts technology changes, and WS represents the reference paradigm without accounting for preference or technology changes. By comparing the costs and benefits of these paradigms, solutions derived for the whole parameter domains based on data for a globally representative individual suggest that whenever environmental sustainability is pursued for welfare reasons within a utilitarian perspective (i.e., WS, AG, DG), it is not worth pursuing. In contrast, if environmental sustainability is achieved for ethical reasons within an egalitarian perspective (i.e., SS), it is worth pursuing, even with an increased world population. In terms of feasibility (i.e., whether there are realistic parameter values such that a given sustainability paradigm can achieve its goal), solutions are ranked ethics > preference > technology (i.e., SS > DG > AG), whereas WS is unfeasible. Thus, WS, AG, and DG are inconsistent sustainability paradigms, SS empirically solves the theoretical dispute on absolute rights, and environmental sustainability must be treated as an ethical issue. A conceptual discussion about environmental ethics and a statistical analysis based on panel data at a country level support the same insights. In terms of reliability (i.e., whether there are national policies or international agreements which can support a feasible sustainability paradigm), SS could be enforced by a global environmental agreement, supported by 66/55% of governments (i.e., top-down approach) and by 56/51% of citizens (i.e., bottom-up approach), in the most certain/uncertain scenarios, respectively.
The central question in this article is, on what ethical basis should we decide how to deal with nature? One important issue is whether a human-centered utilitarian perspective is sufficient to protect the environment and, if not, what alternatives are possible. A key philosophical problem concerns the extent to which inherent value can be ascribed to things that are not human, including animals, vegetation, and even land. Philosophers do not agree among themselves on these issues. This article proposes that an environmental ethic should explicitly consider the consistency of our environmental actions with our values. A concluding discussion shows how a psychological theory of values may provide some insights into the way we think about ethical dilemmas.
This essay offers a critique of environmental ethics and argues that a post-environmental ethics may be unavoidable. It does so by exposing and questioning the ontological assumptions common to otherwise different modalities of environmental ethics. These modalities, it is argued, rest upon an implicit or explicit ‘material essentialism’. Such essentialism entails the belief that putatively ‘environmental’ entities have discrete and relatively enduring properties. These properties ‘anchor’ ethical claims and permit the objects of ethical considerability to be named. Against this, it is argued that a non-essentialist ontology is preferable. This ontology presumes neither that environmental phenomena are simply environmental nor that their properties can be ‘fixed’ under some determinate description. Drawing on recent ‘hybrid’ research in human geography and elsewhere, it is suggested that the motility and mutability of ostensibly environmental entities be recognised. This recognition, I conclude, desta bilises conventional environmental ethics and calls for a more supple mode of ethical reasoning.
Sustainable Development means ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. It is a very complex and broad based concept that incorporates following principles, which are directly or indirectly applicable to developmental activities: (a) economic sustainability, (b) ecological sustainability, (c) social sustainability and (d) cultural sustainability. The sustainable development has both intra-generational and inter-generational equities and several approaches. It has some important measures too that will be discussed here.
Our behaviour and policies with regard to nature and the environment should be guided by a code of ethics, which is to be derived from basic principles and from a pragmatic consideration of the issues at stake. The man–nature relationship has always been ambiguous, nature being seen as both a provider and an enemy. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man is set apart from nature and called to dominate it, although this attitude has been revised to become one of stewardship. Oriental religions, on the other hand, have a more holistic view and consider humans as an integral part of nature. Modern philosophers have views ranging from anthropocentrism to biocentrism and egocentrism. It is suggested to take a pragmatic approach by which primary human needs are met first and foremost whereas the needs of other living organisms and ecosystems are allowed to prevail over secondary human needs. A plea is made to support the Earth Charter, which embodies in its principles and prescriptions a balanced respect for nature and future human generations.
Environmental ethics—the study of ethical questions raised by human relations with the nonhuman environment—emerged as an important subfield of philosophy during the 1970s. It is now a flourishing area of research. This article provides a review of the secular, Western traditions in the field. It examines both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric claims about what has value, as well as divergent views about whether environmental ethics should be concerned with bringing about best consequences, respecting principles and rights, or embodying environmental virtues. The article also briefly considers two critical traditions—ecofeminism and environmental pragmatism—and explores some of the difficult environmental ethics questions posed by anthropogenic climate change.
Over the past two decades, our knowledge of the ecological impacts of roads has increased rapidly. It is now clear that the environmental effects of transportation infrastructure are inextricable from transportation benefits to economic, social, and cultural values. Despite the necessity of optimizing these multiple values, road planners, scientists, and practitioners have no established methodology or pluralistic approach to address growing ethical complexities. We articulate five ethical issues that could be addressed by developing an ethic of road ecology in order to facilitate the identification, reasoning, and harmonization of ethical dimensions of road planning and development. This inquiry into road ecology can draw lessons from existing applied ethics, such as in ecological restoration and urban planning, to build a narrative that is informed by both science and ethics. We illustrate five ethical issues presented through case studies that elaborate on the motivations, responsibilities, and duties that should be considered in ethically and scientifically complicated road building decisions. To address these issues, we encourage the development of a code of ethics, dedicated intellectual forums, and practical guidance to assist road planners, and more broadly transportation practitioners, to resolve complex ethical quandaries systematically. We hope this perspective encourages conversation for a holistic yet pragmatic approach to this applied ethics problem, while also assisting responsible parties as they navigate difficult moral terrain.
Over six million people die prematurely each year from exposure to air pollution. Current air quality metrics insufficiently monitor exposure to air pollutants. This gap hinders the ability of decisionmakers to address the public health impacts of air pollution. To spur new emissions control policies and ensure implemented solutions realize meaningful gains in environmental health, we develop a framework of public-health-focused air quality indicators that quantifies over 200 countries’ trends in exposure to particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds. We couple population density to ground-level pollutant concentrations to derive population-weighted exposure metrics that quantify the pollutant levels experienced by the average resident in each country. Our analyses demonstrate that most residents in 171 countries experience pollutant levels exceeding international health guidelines. In addition, we find a negative correlation between temporal trends in ozone and nitrogen oxide concentrations, which-when qualitatively interpreted with a simple atmospheric chemistry box model-can help describe the apparent tradeoff between the mitigation of these two pollutants on local scales. These novel indicators and their applications enable regulators to identify their most critical pollutant exposure trends and allow countries to track the performance of their emission control policies over time.
Using open-ended responses from 5297 interviews across 11 countries, this study reports what people say are the most important reasons to protect nature. Overall, and in some individual countries (e.g., Brazil, China, South Africa, South Korea, United States), the most frequently stated reason was an anthropocentric motive of ensuring human health and survival. But in some countries (e.g., Kenya, United Kingdom, Indonesia), ecocentric and altruistic motives-such as maintaining balance in nature’s delicate interconnected system or protecting nature for future generations-were more common.
The present study seeks to introduce the European Christian community to the debate on environmental degradation while displaying its important role and theological perspectives in the resolution of the environmental crisis. The fundamental question authors have asked here is if Christianity supports pro-environmental attitudes compared to other religions, in a context where religion, in general, represents the ethical foundation of our civilization and, thus, an important behavior guide. The discussion becomes all the more interesting as many voices have identified the Christian theological tradition as ecologically bankrupt, while others as a source for environmental ethics. In seeking to refute or to confirm the Lynne White’s thesis, firstly, we aimed to rediscover the biblical ecological consciousness and the theology of care. Secondly, following the literature evidence on relevant differences between countries and the influence that religion has on approaching environmental issues, we considered the religion-environmental correlation within a particular country context. For this, data from the European Values Study survey were used, by including 20 European countries. One novelty of this contribution is to highlight the influence of the legacy of the former political regime on pro-environmental attitude and religious practices. The study testifies that the search for a common language for environmental stewardship is a difficult task and fundamental to how we behave. Despite this, within this frame of discussion, we argue that Christianity, as a major social actor, co-exists with and can enhance the interest in and respect for nature.
In this article I distill a trio of lessons for Christian environmental ethics from the stewardship model’s detractors and rivals. I begin by delineating stewardship and explaining the model’s initial prevalence as Christians’ primary response to widespread recognition of environmental crisis and their faith’s alleged culpability for it. I then distinguish two waves of criticism that, by denouncing stewardship’s substance and method, thoroughly discredited the model among Christian ethicists. Yet, as stewardship was being rejected for its susceptibility to anthropocentrism, one of its chief competitors—the land ethic—was being repudiated for its liability to misanthropy. I argue that these developments give Christians cause to (1) affirm a hierarchical non-anthropocentrism that prioritizes human interests; (2) premise such priority in part on human embrace of non-anthropocentrism; and (3) interpret environmental ethics as more than a matter of models like stewardship.
Theories of ethics try to answer the question, ‘How ought we to live?’. An environmental ethic refers to our natural surroundings in giving the answer. It may claim that all natural things and systems are of value in their own right and worthy of moral respect. A weaker position is the biocentric one, arguing that living things merit moral consideration. An ethic which restricts the possession of moral value to human persons can still be environmental. Such a view may depict the existence of certain natural values as necessary for the flourishing of present and future generations of human beings. Moral respect for animals has been discussed since the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers, while the significance to our wellbeing of the natural environment has been pondered since the time of Kant and Rousseau. The relation of the natural to the built environment, and the importance of place, is a central feature of the philosophy of Heidegger. Under the impact of increasing species loss and land clearance, the work on environmental ethics since the 1970s has focused largely on one specific aspect of the environment – nature in the wild.
This essay provides an overview of the field of environmental ethics. I sketch the major debates in the field from its inception in the 1970s to today, explaining both the central tenets of the schools of thought within the field and the arguments that have been given for and against them. I describe the main trends within the field as a whole and review some of the criticisms that have been offered of prevailing views.
Online paper by John C. Bergstrom, Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Prof. Bergstrom teaches and conducts research related to natural resource, environmental and agricultural topics and issues. As a Christian professor, he is interested in the integration of Biblical teaching on stewardship and our responsibilities as stewards and managers of God’s creation.
Ethics are a broad way of thinking about what constitutes a good life and how to live one. They address questions of right and wrong, making good decisions, and the character or attributes necessary to live a good life. Applied ethics address these issues with a special emphasis on how they can be lived out in a practical manner. Environmental ethics apply ethical thinking to the natural world and the relationship between humans and the earth. Environmental ethics are a key feature of environmental studies, but they have application in many other fields as human society grapples in a more meaningful way with pollution, resource degradation, the threat of extinction, and global climate disruption.
This book is about the extent, origins and causes of the environmental crisis. Dr Northcott argues that Christianity has lost the biblical awareness of the inter-connectedness of all life. He shows how Christian theologians and believers might recover a more ecologically friendly belief system and life style. The author provides an important corrective to secular approaches to environmental ethics, including utilitarian individualism, animal rights theories and deep ecology. He contends that neither the stewardship tradition, nor the panentheist or process ecological theologies have successfully mobilised the Christian tradition. He demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible contains an ecological message which is close to the traditions of many primal and indigenous peoples and which provides an important corrective to instrumental attitudes to nature in much modern philosophy and Christian ethics.
Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its non-human contents. This entry covers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; (2) the development of the discipline from the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, animism and social ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; (5) the broader concerns of some thinkers with wilderness, the built environment and the politics of poverty; and (6) the ethics of sustainability and climate change.
Environmental ethics, as a field of philosophical study, began in the 1970s and 1980s, in part as a result of the environmental movement and largely in Anglo-American work. Its roots trace to the monumental technological discoveries of the twentieth century, such as nuclear power and chemical pesticides; their overuse or misuse; and recognition of the environmental degradation these technologies have caused. Two paradigm examples of how the misuse of technology has caused massive environmental damage and consequently raised new ethical questions are DDT and nuclear power. From the point of view of the relative importance of human interests, the new field of environmental ethics can be divided roughly into anthropocentric, non-anthropocentric, and mixed approaches.
In this Very Short Introduction Robin Attfield traces the origins of environmental ethics as a discipline, and considers how it defends the independent value of living creatures, and the need to make decisions informed by the needs and interests of future generations. Exploring the diverse approaches to ethical decisions and judgements, he highlights the importance of making processes of production and consumption sustainable and of addressing human population levels, together with
policies for preserving species, sub-species, and their habitats. Along the way Attfield discusses different movements such as Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, the Environmental Justice movement and the Green movement, and also considers the attitudes to the environment of the world’s religions, including the
approach from the major religions and the contributions of the indigenous religions of Asia, Africa and North America. Analysing the current threat of climate change, and proposals for climate engineering, he demonstrates how responsibility for the environment ultimately lies with us all, from states and corporations to individuals, and emphasises how concerted action is required to manage our environment ethically and sustainably.
Environmental ethics is an academic subfield of philosophy concerned with normative and evaluative propositions about the world of nature and, perhaps more generally, the moral fabric of relations between human beings and the world we occupy. This Handbook contains forty-five newly commissioned essays written by leading experts and emerging voices. The essays range over a broad variety of issues, concepts, and perspectives that are both central to and characteristic of the field, thus providing an authoritative but accessible account of the history, analysis, and prospect of ideas that are essential to contemporary environmental ethics. The Handbook includes sections on the broad social contexts in which we find ourselves (e.g., chapters on history, science, economics, governance, and the Anthropocene), on what ought to count morally and why (e.g., chapters on humanity, animals, living individuals, ecological collectives, and wild nature), on the nature and meaning of environmental values (e.g., truth and goodness, practical reasons, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and aesthetics), on theoretical understandings of how we should act (e.g., on consequentialism, duty and obligation, character, caring relationships, and the sacred), on key concepts (e.g., responsibility, justice, gender, rights, ecological space, risk and precaution, citizenship, future generations, and sustainability), on specific areas of environmental concern (e.g., pollution, population, energy, food, water, mass extinction, technology and ecosystem management), on climate change considered as the defining environmental problem of our time (e.g., chapters on mitigation, adaptation, diplomacy, and geoengineering), and on social change (e.g., pragmatism, conflict, sacrifice, and action).
Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology is an international academic journal that studies the relationships between religion, culture, and ecology worldwide. The journal addresses how cultural and ecological developments influence the world’s major religions, giving rise to new forms of religious expression, and how in turn religious belief and cultural background can influence peoples’ attitudes toward ecology.
ES&T is an impactful environmental science and technology research journal that aims to be transformational and direction-setting, publishing rigorous and robust papers for a multidisciplinary and diverse audience of scientists, policy makers and the broad environmental community. For more than 50 years, ES&T has been a foundational focus for thought-leading, policy-changing contributions and will continue to serve as the home for significant, broadly relevant, and generalizable research that serves to inform decision-making. The journal advances rigorous scholarship on complex environmental phenomena, particularly with respect to fate, transport, and transformation in natural and engineered systems, while simultaneously facilitating the solution of critical environmental problems. In addition to novelty and significance of research, ES&T considers the relevance of submitted manuscripts to its broad readership.
A Multidisciplinary Journal of Environmental Sciences and Engineering. Environmental Research is a multi-disciplinary journal publishing high quality and novel information about anthropogenic issues of global relevance and applicability in a wide range of environmental disciplines, and demonstrating environmental application in the real-world context.
Environmental Ethics publishes articles, reviews and discussions exploring the philosophical aspects of environmental problems. Since 1979 it has provided a peer-reviewed forum for diverse interests and attitudes, bringing together the nonprofessional environmental philosophy tradition with the professional interest in the subject. It is published by the Center for Environmental Philosophy at the University of North Texas.
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is the driving force of investment in environmental science in the UK. We advance the frontier of environmental science by commissioning new research, infrastructure and training that delivers valuable scientific breakthroughs.
NERC invests public money in world-leading science, designed to help us sustain and benefit from our natural resources, predict and respond to natural hazards and understand environmental change.
We explore a wide range of issues including climate change, energy, transport, water, resource use, land use, conservation, cities and communities, business and lifestyles. We specialise in participatory, action-oriented research that brings together government, business, NGOs and local communities to enhance the relevance, quality and practical influence of our research.
The Center for Environmental Ethics and Law seeks to bear witness to, share, and expand upon principles of environmental ethics in order to better inform local, regional, national, and international decision-makers when drafting and implementing law, policies, and programs.
The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics has been the leader in applied ethics since 1986. Our comprehensive approach to enlightening people and organizations through materials offered on our website, customized engagements with organizations, and our commitment to Santa Clara University students to be trained in applied ethics has continued to increase our impact. Our Framework for Ethical Decision-Making is recognized by the people and organizations that reach out to the Center for resources as a clear and helpful process to make better decisions.
Northeastern’s Ethics Institute addresses the normative dimensions – ethical, religious, and epistemological – of social and environmental issues through interdisciplinary research and public scholarship.
The Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) encourages research and education about the environment and its many interactions with human society.
The Center draws its strength from faculty members and students across the University who make up a remarkable intellectual community of scholars, researchers, and teachers of diverse fields including chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, engineering and applied sciences, history, biology, public health and medicine, government, business, economics, religion, literature, and the law. The most pressing problems facing our natural environment are complex, often requiring collaborative investigation by scholars versed in different disciplines. By connecting scholars and practitioners from different disciplines, the Center for the Environment seeks to raise the quality of environmental research at Harvard and beyond.
International treaties, including Conferences of the Parties, have been signed and global warming countermeasures are being proposed all over the world. Resources on this page are drawn from the Uehiro-Carnegie-Oxford Conference, ‘Global Warming-Environmental Ethics and Its Practice’, which took place in New York in October 2015, with an international group of participants seeking to address the following questions: Is it possible to establish an environmental ethics to combat global warming?
The Environmental Change Institute was established in 1991 ‘to organize and promote interdisciplinary research on the nature, causes and impact of environmental change and to contribute to the development of management strategies for coping with future environmental change’.
Over the last 25 years we have developed an international track record for research in climate, ecosystems and energy and a growing expertise in the fields of food and water. We respond to the challenges in these areas through an interdisciplinary and integrated programme of understanding processes of change; exploring sustainable solutions; and influencing change through education and partnership.
For more than a century, the Yale School of the Environment has been at the forefront of turning science into solutions. We’ve built upon our historic strengths in forestry and land management, developing a more comprehensive and rigorous curriculum that combines environmental science and sustainability with business, law, policy, energy, and natural resources. When our students graduate, they are already nationally and internationally renowned environmental leaders.
The Center for Climatic Research focuses on interdisciplinary research regarding the Earth’s climate system, including the causes and impacts of historical, ongoing, and projected climate variability and change, with geographic focuses that span from local to global scale. The center’s diverse activities and societal contributions include the training of students and postdoctoral researchers as the next generation of climate scientists, development of guidance for state government and regional stakeholders regarding climate change impacts and adaptation, and advancement of scientific understanding of the coupled Earth system.
Founded in 2014, the Environmental Solutions Initiative is MIT’s institute-wide effort to mobilize the substantial scientific, engineering, policy, and design capacity of our community to contribute to addressing climate change and other environmental challenges of global import. We pursue multidisciplinary research, education, events, and partnerships to help move society toward an environmentally and socially sustainable future.
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts on MIT’s main campus, ESI is powered by a lean staff working closely with students and faculty across the full spectrum of disciplines. Led by architecture professor John E. Fernandez, a leading scholar in the emerging field of urban metabolism, ESI is advised by students, faculty, alumni, and thought leaders from many sectors of society.
C-EENRG’s core mission is to conduct integrative research on the governance of environmental transitions, understood as social and technological processes driven by environmental constraints that lead to fundamental changes in social organisation. Our work draws upon the knowledge of the drivers and implications of environmental change generated in various centres across the University of Cambridge and focuses on the law and governance dimensions of environmental transitions. Law is viewed as a technology to bring, guide and/or manage environment-driven societal transformation.
Environmental Defense Fund’s mission is to preserve the natural systems on which all life depends. Guided by science and economics, we find practical and lasting solutions to the most serious environmental problems. What distinguishes Environmental Defense Fund is the combination of what we protect and how we protect it.
We work to solve the most critical environmental problems facing the planet. This has drawn us to areas that span the biosphere: climate, oceans, ecosystems and health. Since these topics are intertwined, our solutions take a multidisciplinary approach. We work in concert with other organizations — as well as with business, government and communities — and avoid duplicating work already being done effectively by others.